As China's great reformer Kang Youwei already knew, realising the Great Harmony is going to take centuries. The Party posits that the Lesser Prosperity is around the corner, but that is a domestic objective. Abroad, it is pursuing a ‘harmonious world order’, though what Beijing has brought about seems rather like the ‘Great Disharmony’ – certainly in East Asia. Would a politically-reformed China conduct its affairs differently? It probably would, for a democratically-elected government must direct its energies toward issues like housing, healthcare and employment – otherwise it will not be re-elected. Nationalism causes, in the words of the ‘Tibetan’ Xuan Zang (interviewed in Chapter 6), a ‘briefly burning passion’, but in the long term its base is too narrow to provide an elected government with any legitimacy. This general observation, though, does not do justice to the complexity characterising the foreign policy of every major power. The United States is a democratic country, but in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it has waged many wars sanctioned by Congress. Democracy does also not necessarily lead to an openminded attitude towards the world. The short-sighted policy of ‘America First’ testifies to that. Trump's turning away from the world is, however, not a unique phenomenon in American history. The pitching back and forth between isolationism and involvement defines every major power.

A democratic China will still fight to defend its ‘core interests’, just as today's regime does not engage in power politics alone. It also conducts an active soft-power policy, provides concessional loans to developing countries on a large scale and supplies soldiers for un peacekeeping missions. But despite these necessary nuances, an authoritarian China is more inclined to pursue military adventure than a reformed China will. The logic of nationalism as a new source of legitimacy requires it to do so. The psychological impetus for this expansion of power – the yearning for reputation and respect – weighs heavier on a regime that is unsure of its domestic legitimacy than for a democratically-elected government; and certainly, when that same regime regularly plays the humiliation card for past ills inflicted on China.